APPENDIX E
Digital Tools to Make Your Next Meeting More Productive
by Alexandra Samuel
Meetings may seem like the ultimate holdout against the digitization of working life: After all, what’s more analog than talking directly with another person? Even though the core work of a meeting—listening to and connecting with other people—hasn’t changed, there are lots of ways technology can make that work easier and more effective. Given how much of our working lives we spend in meetings, building a digital meeting toolkit is one of the smartest investments you can make in tech-savvy productivity. Here are the tools you need.
Before Your Meeting
Find a group meeting time with Doodle, which lets you poll the various people who are part of your meeting and find a time that works for everyone. You’ll get the best results if you hook it up to your own calendar (so you only offer people options that actually work for you) and if you set expectations by explaining you’re using Doodle to find the time that works for as many people as possible—even if you can’t find one that works for everyone.
Quickly schedule one-on-one meetings so the process of finding a time doesn’t consume more time than the meeting itself. Use Google appointment slots or Calendly to set up times when you’re available for calls or meetings, and when you want to take a meeting, share the link to your open slots.
If you’re booking a call with someone in another time zone, make sure you’re actually booking the same time into your calendars. Send an actual calendar invitation, rather than just agreeing on a time via e-mail, and as long as your calendaring app has built-in time zone support (nearly all of them do), you can avoid making a mistake. And use Every Time Zone to figure out what the time zone difference actually is, so you don’t invite someone to a 4 a.m. meeting.
Find a place to meet. On-demand services like Liquidspace or Desks Near Me give you lots of options for identifying a meeting space, even when you’re on the road. You can book weekly, daily, or even by the hour.
During Your Meeting
Take notes in Evernote or another dedicated digital note book application. Capturing good, searchable notes makes meetings much more valuable, and the right note-taking tool will make it easy for you to file your meeting notes with the project or topics they relate to. Best of all, if you use the Evernote mobile app to snap pictures of your meeting whiteboard or flip charts, optical character recognition makes those handwritten notes searchable, too.
Share note taking with Google Docs. When you use a Google Docs document to capture meeting updates in more-or-less real time, you’ll be able to see and contribute to each other’s notes as long as you have an internet connection. (Be sure to copy the meeting notes in Evernote afterward, if that’s where you like to keep all your project notes.) That means you and your team can take notes collaboratively, so that if one person’s talking, another person records what’s being said. This is a particularly nifty trick if you’re working with one or more colleagues on a meeting with a client or another team, because you have a kind of psychic link—you can suggest ideas to one another alongside the notes you’re taking. And if you don’t have an internet connection but you and your colleagues all work on Macs, you can use the fab SubEthaEdit to collaborate with even less lag than you get on Google Docs, simply by creating a computer-to-computer network.
Bring an extra screen to view reference materials. The one downside of digital note taking is that if you need to refer to a document during your meeting, you have to flip back and forth between your note-taking application and your reference document. That’s why I always carry my iPad. I use the application GoodReader to store any PDFs or documents I might need to look at during a meeting. And because GoodReader is hooked up to my DropBox account, I can always access a document I need to have open, even if I didn’t think to preload it in GoodReader.
Collaborate with mind mapping. I’m a huge fan of mind mapping: diagramming ideas and information visually, using something that looks like a tree or flowchart. While some people actually take their meeting notes in mind map form (been there, done that, reverted to text), I find mind maps most useful when I’m part of a group discussion where we need to capture and organize ideas together. My two favorite mind-mapping apps for meetings are MindMeister (very flexible and powerful) and Popplet (less expensive, a little easier to use, less flexible). If you’re using mind mapping in a face-to-face meeting, you can simply hook a projector up to one computer, but the real-time collaboration support in these apps mean they’re great for using during virtual meetings, too.
Inspire new thinking. Your meeting outcomes will only be as good as the thinking that goes into them. But huddling around a PowerPoint presentation is hardly a recipe for inspiring bold new ideas. Instead, think about using a collaborative visual tool like Popplet to share ideas, so that you can reorganize them on the fly.
Convert action items to tasks. Once you leave a meeting, it’s easy for follow-up steps to fall by the wayside. It really helps if everyone in a meeting actually puts their action items into their task manager—something that’s a lot easier with TaskClone. A reader put me onto this service, which can scan Evernote to find any action items and then import them into your favorite task management tool.
Access your outcomes. Too often, we leave meetings with a tangible outcome, only to lose it in the digital morass. Even if you generally take your meeting notes in Evernote or another digital note-taking program, you may still have trouble tracking down that brilliant brainstorm that occurred on a pile of Post-its, the inspired idea you wrote in your paper notebook, or the meeting notes written on a flipchart. That’s why it’s handy to snap a photo of any written output and add it to Evernote, so that it becomes searchable.
For Virtual or Phone Meetings
While all the tools I’ve mentioned here are useful in both face-to-face and virtual meetings, there are a few extra tools I’d recommend for people conducting virtual or phone meetings.
Share screens faster with Join.me. I’ve tried GoTo-Meeting, WebEx, Google Hangouts, and Skype. They all work some (or even most) of the time. But the only bullet-proof screen-sharing tool I’ve used is Join.me. It works for me every time, and because it’s so fast to set up a meeting and share a link, it works even if I’m already midcall when I realize I need to share my screen.
Choose a back channel. If you’re doing a client or prospect call with colleagues who are in another office or location, keep yourselves in sync by choosing an instant messaging back channel before your meeting begins. There’s nothing worse than needing to send your copre-senter an urgent note but discovering you have to wait for him to read his e-mail so he can see it. A back channel chat provides a way of discreetly asking someone to let the conversation move forward or of checking in with other meeting attendees to see if they feel like your meeting has lost focus. Your back channel can be Skype, Lync, MSN, Apple Messages, or Gmail Chat—any messaging application works, as long as it has desktop support (so you’re not trying to type urgent messages into your phone) and you have connected to your colleague before the meeting begins. (Send a test message just to be sure.) Even if you’re using a virtual meeting application that supports private messaging, I recommend using a separate app as your back channel so you don’t accidentally share your message with the client.
Record crucial phone meetings. If you’re participating in a phone meeting and aren’t in a position to take notes (or can’t type fast enough), consider recording your call for future reference. TapeACall, which is available for both iPhone and Android, makes it really easy: Just install the app, and then conference the TapeACall number into your call. (Note that in many jurisdictions it’s illegal to tape a call unless everyone consents.)
Set up these tools on your computer and mobile devices, and you’ll be better equipped to make the most of your meetings. Far from distracting you from your work and colleagues, this is one place technology can help you reconnect with them—by making the time you spend together as valuable as possible.
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Alexandra Samuel is a speaker, researcher, and writer who works with the world’s leading companies to understand their online customers and craft data-driven reports such as “Sharing Is the New Buying.” The author of Work Smarter with Social Media (Harvard Business Review Press, 2015), Alex holds a PhD in political science from Harvard University. Follow Alex on Twitter @awsamuel.
Adapted from content posted on hbr.org on March 12, 2015 and July 3, 2015